Yet she was sensibly aware that this windfall meant a short cut to things which she had only looked to attain by plodding over economic hills.  She could say good-by to singing in photoplay houses, to vaudeville engagements, to concert work in provincial towns.  She could hitch her wagon to a star and go straight up the avenue that led to a career, if it were in her to achieve greatness.  Pleasant dreams in which the buoyant ego soared, until the logical interpretation of her ambitions brought her to a more practical consideration of ways and means, and that in turn confronted her with the fact that she could leave the Pacific coast to-morrow morning if she so chose.

Why should she not so choose?

She was her own mistress, free as the wind.  Fyfe had said that.  She looked out into the smoky veil that shrouded the water front and the hills across the Inlet, that swirled and eddied above the giant fir in Stanley Park, and her mind flicked back to Roaring Lake where the Red Flower of Kipling’s Jungle Book bloomed to her husband’s ruin.  Did it?  She wondered.  She could not think of him as beaten, bested in any undertaking.  She had never been able to think of him in those terms.  Always to her he had conveyed the impression of a superman.  Always she had been a little in awe of him, of his strength, his patient, inflexible determination, glimpsing under his habitual repression certain tremendous forces.  She could not conceive him as a broken man.

Staring out into the smoky air, she wondered if the fires at Roaring Lake still ravaged that noble forest; if Fyfe’s resources, like her brother’s, were wholly involved in standing timber, and if that timber were doomed?  She craved to know.  Secured herself by that green slip in her hand against every possible need, she wondered if it were ordained that the two men whose possession of material resources had molded her into what she was to-day should lose all, be reduced to the same stress that had made her an unwilling drudge in her brother’s kitchen.  Then she recalled that for Charlie there was an equivalent sum due,—­a share like her own.  At the worst, he had the nucleus of another fortune.

Curled among the pillows of her bed that night, she looked over the evening papers, read with a swift heart-sinking that the Roaring Lake fire was assuming terrific proportions, that nothing but a deluge of rain would stay it now.  And more significantly, except for a minor blaze or two, the fire raged almost wholly upon and around the Fyfe block of limits.  She laid aside the papers, switched off the lights, and lay staring wide-eyed at the dusky ceiling.

At twenty minutes of midnight she was called to the door of her room to receive a telegram.  It was from Linda, and it read: 

    “Charlie badly hurt.  Can you come?”

Stella reached for the telephone receiver.  The night clerk at the C.P.R. depot told her the first train she could take left at six in the morning.  That meant reaching the Springs at nine-thirty.  Nine and a half hours to sit with idle hands, in suspense.  She did not knew what tragic denouement awaited there, what she could do once she reached there.  She knew only that a fever of impatience burned in her.  The message had strung her suddenly taut, as if a crisis had arisen in which willy-nilly she must take a hand.